Was Arthur MacWaters fired as the Chief Marketing Officer of Cracker Barrel? No, that's not true: A viral social media post containing a fake LinkedIn screenshot showing several previous positions at companies involved in controversial rebranding efforts was meant as a joke. According to his real LinkedIn bio MacWaters never held the position.
The claim appeared as a post on X (archived here) where it was published by MacWaters on August 24, 2025. It read:
I was fired from Cracker Barrel today. I ran our company's rebranding team.
Turns out a small group of angry activists
didn't like that we took the old guy off the logo and threw a fitThey blamed me for tanking the stock price 19% and fired me on the spot.
Taking some time to reflect and will start looking for jobs soon!
It was accompanied by this image, showing previous positions at Jaguar, Bud Light, Netflix Max Brands Marketing and Coca Cola:
(Image source: image downloaded from @ArthurMacwaters post on x.com)
All previous jobs in the image were related to famously controversial rebrandings or reimaginings of popular brands, products or artists, including New Coke, Clippy, Arche Deluxe, Prince, Qwikster, Bud Light and Jaguar, making it pretty obvious the post was a joke.
MacWaters' actual LinkedIn bio (archived here) shows none of these positions:
(Image source: screenshot of Arthur MacWaters LinkedIn bio)
However, soon after the joke post was made, cropped screenshots of it started circulating that left off the previous positions in the list, likely leading some people to believe it was real. Comedian Terrence K. Williams for example posted the abbreviated screenshot of the post on Facebook (archived here) in combination with a message that said "Cracker Barrel just fired him". This is what the abbreviated image looked like:
(Image source: Facebook post by Terrence K. Williams)
